Sunshine Academy

Chapter 3

Late September is an unusual time for an outbreak of flower disease. Still, as Helga bent over her daisies, she noticed the drastic change in color in the lower foliage area. Some of it was brown; some of it was already dead. Perhaps it was the wet weather? Although, she could've sworn that they were fine just yesterday and now they were dying, but it was absurd to think that such damage could've occurred over night.

As puzzling as this was, she had no time to fuss over flora. She left the garden and went back into the kitchen to start preparing Violet's last breakfast here at the house.

She held back tears as she fried the eggs. She liked them sunny side up. Would they make them this way for her at this new school? Would they take good care of her little girl? Will she be happy?

When she moved on to preparing Jane's fruit cup, because the already skinny mistress was on yet another diet, she made sure to spit in it.

Helga, a plump lady with short black hair, was closing in on her fiftieth year of life; one would think she'd have more maturity. However, this intruder-mistress, as she called her in the privacy of her own mind, was sending Violet away. She knew better than to believe any bullshit about how this was an act of kindness, or that it was for Violet's own good. No, Helga understood women; she knew first-hand the evil that comes from a woman's jealousy, and although her own envious nature lead her to do things she wasn't proud of, things that still keep her up at night till this day, things she did when she was about the same age as Jane, she never tore apart a family, she was never so cruel as to separate an orphan girl from her one remaining family member and the woman who raised her.

How dare she?! Yes, she was now her step-mother, and yes Helga was only a servant in this house, but she is the servant who refused to sleep during the nights when Violet was sick. She is the servant who took her to buy her first bra, the servant who comforted and educated her when she was crying in terror after finding blood on her underwear for the first time.(The poor sweetheart thought she was going to die.) She is the servant who brushed her hair every night before bed, the servant who always knew what to make her when she had stomach aches and the servant who told her stories about her mother and how much she loved her when she asked for it. She should have more say in her almost-daughter's education than this wench who's only been part of her life for less than a year.

Unfortunately, she needed this job. She, therefore, could not object to the master's decisions, or those of his new bride. She was old, if she suddenly found herself unemployed; no one else would hire her. She felt helpless and crushed, unable to aid her little darling, and so the only satisfaction she could realistically hope for, as small as it was, was spitting in the bitch's food.